My parents got a puppy. These are the same people who, upon rescuing a dog, re-homed it with my sister ostensibly because he was impossible to train but mostly because they were too lazy to work at it. Evidence: My sister trained him. This is the same person who sleep-trained her child by letting him sleep in front of the TV all night. But we’re not here to judge.

My father said he might like a puppy and within 24 hours he had a puppy. Named Hope. For obvious cancer-sucks-related reasons. Debra and I had the same thought “How long until this puppy gets handed down to us? Probably after all the fun puppyhood is over and there’s extensive retraining to do. Yep. Probably then.” That’ll be five dollars ma’am.

On the other hand, my father has a puppy. And he’s happy to have a puppy. I think. I mean, it’s hard to tell but he seems happy. And she’s cute. And it’s cute to see him cuddle her. Which makes my mom happy. Which makes him happy and that makes me happy. And so my wife is happy. And the world is good.

If he’d been himself, he would have done as he’s always done and rescued a rottweiler. And let me tell you, in my experience (too painful to link here but if you go searching for Sam you’ll find it), rottweilers rescued by my father have a taste for cats. But instead, cancer crept up on him and sucked out the part that was biased against anything not huge, and guard dog-y, and left him, a man of few words, with even fewer.

I want a puppy.

So thank you Hope, for being the silver lining in this week’s shitty cancer episode.